


Quanta:   Six Harry Kim/Tom Paris Kisses

by phinnia



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-03
Updated: 2018-10-04
Packaged: 2019-07-24 17:40:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16179992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phinnia/pseuds/phinnia
Summary: I have a thing about doing these.   Six first kisses, from six different timelines.





	1. Chapter 1

The first first one was in that bar on Deep Space Nine.  
  
Tom was looking through the bar, sipping his Irish coffee (a peculiar affectation he’d had to tell the bartender how to make, but he liked them and hadn’t had one in a while) when he noticed an ensign in gold and black sitting at the end of the bar getting ripped off by the bartender.  
  
Typical.  
  
He was cute, too.   Asian - black hair, dark eyes; olive skin.   Greener than the grass in Auckland in January, though.    
  
He smiled into his coffee cup for a second, drained it, then slammed the empty cup down on the bar, leaned over and kissed this young ensign on the lips, hard.  
  
But surprisingly - very surprisingly - the kid dropped the tray of lobi crystals he was looking at, wrapped a hand around the back of Tom’s neck, and his lips parted.  
  
They hadn’t even met, but this kid was a damn good kisser.     
  
Tom broke off the kiss - reluctantly - and looked directly in the kid’s eyes.   “Don’t spend all our money in here.”  
  
The kid looked up at him.   “I … I won’t.”  
  
The bartender looked between them, and decided to give up while he was still not too far behind.    He spots another officer, this one in science blue, and goes over there.     
  
“C’mon.”   Tom put his arm around the kid’s waist.   “Didn’t they warn you about Ferengi at the Academy?”  
  
“They did.”   The kid grins up at him.   “Harry Kim.”  
  
“Tom Paris.   You’re a damn good kisser.”  
  
“So are you.”  
  
  
The next first time was just as they’d gotten to some planet - the aborted shoreleave to make up for Akitiri.   It was in another bar.   Harry had made the mistake of letting Tom pick the drinks.  
  
“What _is_ this?”   He asks, squinting at it.   It was pink and orange and layered.  
  
“I have no idea.”  Tom replies.   “I couldn’t pronounce what it was called.   The language seems to be mostly clicking.”   He also has an orange and pink layered drink.   They have a very long and bendy and twisty straw, which, as it turns out, is made from the local version of grass.  
  
The drinks are extremely strong, _definitely_ not synthehol, and taste like cotton candy fruit.   He tries to keep up with Tom, but always seems to be at least a drink behind.  
  
“Never try to match drinks with a guy who’s done time, Harry.”  Tom laughs after he’s noticed.  
  
“What makes you think I’d lose?”   Harry says, trying to look him in the eye.  
  
Tom just snickers.   “I’ve had stronger than this.   Hell, I’ve made stronger than this.”  
  
“You can make your own alcohol?”  
  
“Of course you can, Harry.   They didn’t exactly give us Chateau Rothschild in the penal colony.”   He puts his feet on the table, takes his drink, and starts sipping.  “Alcohol is just rotten fruit.   The more you let it rot, the stronger it gets.   Of course, there are side effects.   Might have gone blind, which is a problem in my line of work.”  
  
“Difficult for a pilot, yeah.”  
  
“Might go blind anyway,  the way things are working out with Sue Nicoletti.”   Tom sighs.  “Beautiful, but so, so cold.   Oh, well.   Maybe I should start hassling Dalby for a change.”  
  
Harry spit his drink across the room.  “ _Dalby_?”  
  
“Why not Dalby?”   Tom raised his eyebrows.   “He’s not bad.”  
  
“Didn’t know you swung that way, that’s all.”  
  
“Lots of things you don’t know about me, Harry.”   Tom was smirking, his ‘Fleet issue boots crossed one over the other at the ankle, tipping his chair back recklessly.   He was going to kill himself like that.     
  
Harry got up to buy them another round.  Tom tipped his chair back a little further, past the point of stability, and the whole mess - the chair, the table, the glasses, the straws made of grass - came tumbling down.  
  
Harry caught him.  
  
Tom looked up.     
  
He had very blue eyes.   Almost the same color as an Earth summer sky, or as Romulan ale.  
  
Harry looked down.  
  
“What?”   Tom whispers.  
  
Harry sets Tom down on the floor, amid the broken table and spilled drinks and glasses, and kneels down beside him, and then he kisses him.    
  
Tom tastes like cotton candy, too.   Cotton candy and summertime.  And his lips are very, very soft.  
  
It’s only a short kiss, before the entire bar descends on them, but it’s enough - enough to make the wildness come out in Tom’s eyes, feral, and Harry thinks he’ll make good use of that later.  


	2. Chapter 2

The third first kiss was just after Harry fell for that hologram woman.   And for some reason, that really, really _irritated_ Tom.    
  
He paced around his quarters that evening instead of sleeping and thought about it.  
  
He got himself a Samarian Sunset made with real alcohol and thought about it.  
  
He chased that down with another real Samarian Sunset, to keep the first one company.  
  
The third Samarian Sunset he sent to check on the first two.   The fourth one he sent after half an hour because the third one didn’t report back.   It was clever.  A reconnaisnce mission.   Yeah.  
  
He thought about Harry and the hologram woman some more, and got more and more irritated.  
  
He sent another Samarian Sunset after the first four.    To do the paperwork, and since the room was spinning now, he decided to lie down.     
  
Here would be fine, right beside the replicator.    
  
How could the ceiling heave like that?  Were they going through some kind of anomaly?   He’d thought Culhane was better at the conn than that.     
  
Maybe it was a really weird anomaly.    
  
Good thing he was never space sick.     
  
But he should stop looking at that heaving ceiling.  
  
  
“Tom?   Tom!”  
  
Someone was slapping his face.   And sitting on him.  
  
“Stop hitting me.”    Tom opened his eyes, blinking, shoving the unknown person off.     
  
The lights hurt.  His entire body hurt. His tongue felt about six times too big for his mouth.     
  
But the ceiling wasn’t heaving anymore, thankfully.  
  
“Are you okay?”  
  
Harry was the unknown person.     
  
Tom groaned and sat up.   “Computer, lights to thirty percent.”  
  
The lights ceased their merciless attack on him.  
  
“I was sleeping.”  Tom sighs, rubbing his eyes.   “Did we ever get through that anomaly?”  
  
“What anomaly?”  
  
“The one that made my ceiling go all funny.”  
  
Harry looked at Tom, and looked at the five empty Samarian Sunset glasses, which were in various places scattered around the apartment.   He picks one up and sniffs it.   “You’re hung over.”  
  
“Am I?   I don’t have the headache yet.”  As if on cue, his head started throbbing.   “Oh, never mind.  There it is.  Why are you here?”  
  
“I thought we were meeting for breakfast in the mess.”  
  
Tom’s stomach roiled.  “Sorry.  There’s no way I can face Neelix’s latest concoction.   Not right now.   Or whatever he’s passing off for coffee these days.”  
  
 “You want one?”  
  
He thought about it but his stomach decided ‘no’.   “Probably water would be better.”     
  
Harry, ever the good friend, got him a glass of water.   Tom sipped it.     
  
“Why are you messing around with holograms, anyway?”   he heard himself saying.   “There are plenty of real people on this ship who’d do you in a hot second.”  
  
“Name one.”   Harry sits down on the sofa next to him.  “That isn’t Jenny Delaney.”  
  
“Me.”  
  
Harry looked at him.  
  
He looked at Harry.  
  
“You’re joking.”   Harry said.  
  
“I have never been more serious.”   Tom tried for a smile.   It ends up being a weak and half-assed smile, but it’s a smile, and he leaves it.    
  
“You’re hung over.”    
  
“I know.   Why do you think I got this way?”  
  
Harry looks at him, very seriously,    Then he gets up and replicates Tom a hangover remedy.   He puts the hypospray to Tom’s neck, and Tom suddenly feels better.  
  
Mostly.  
  
“Now.”   Harry says, sitting back down.  “What were you saying?”  
  
Tom leans over and tackles Harry backwards on the sofa, kissing him instead of using clumsy words.    Harry tastes like coffee and sugar and the faint remains of sleep, and he knows he probably tastes like leftover Samarian Sunsets, but he doesn’t give a damn right now, because Harry’s lips are soft and wet and gentle and he feels good underneath Tom and they have an hour and a half before they’re supposed to be anywhere, and he knows what he can do in an hour and a half.     
  
And they’ll probably even have time for a shower afterwards.     
  
  
The fourth first kiss was when they were doing an away mission with a species known as the Dothraki.   They needed two people to participate in their harvest festival, and Harry had volunteered, and Tom, thinking it had to be better than whatever Neelix was serving today, had decided to go along.  
  
They were beamed down to a large field.   The Dothraki Minister of Trade, a young woman who looked them over and had a distinct twinkle in her eye afterwards, nodded approvingly.     
  
“Your task is to find your way through this maze together.” she said with a large smile on her face.   “Unwary travelers shall become lost, but careful ones will pass the test of the maze easily.”  
  
He and Harry went into the maze.  
  
“Great.”   Tom said.   “I thought this meant food.    No, we’re lost in the Delta Quadrant’s biggest corn maze.”  
  
“I don’t think this is corn.”   Harry scanned it with his tricorder.  “It looks more like some kind of motile grass, actually.   What are you talking about, corn mazes?”  
  
“It was a thing in the twentieth century.   People used to make mazes out of corn.”  
  
“Why?”  
  
“You know, I have absolutely no idea.   Nothing else to do?”  
  
Harry nodded.   “You know anything else about mazes?”  
  
“People say you should keep turning left.”  
  
“Okay.  Let’s try that.”  
  
So they tried turning left, until it was reasonably clear they’d gone around in a big circle.  
  
“We could try right.”   Harry suggested.   “Maybe they don’t play by the same rules.”  
  
“Sure.”     
  
They kept turning right for a while until they realized they were going around in another large circle.  
  
They tried left and then right by turns, but they still found themselves going in a circle.  
  
“This doesn’t make a damn bit of sense.”  Tom flopped down on the ground cover.  “We cannot be going in a circle left and a circle right and a circle left and then right.   One of these ways has to be the way out of there.”  
  
“Well, there’s one more direction to go, logically.”  Harry says.  
  
“Thanks, Tuvok.”    
  
“Any time.”   Harry smirked and helped him to his feet.   “Come on.   Right, then left.”     
  
But that also led them round in a large circle.  
  
Harry leaned against one of the walls of the maze.   Something rustled.  
  
“What the fuck was -“   Tom turned around to see his friend being dragged up against the wall by the motile grass.  “Harry!”    
  
He tried to pull the stuff away, but it was almost impossible to get rid of, and the Dothraki had required them to surrender their weapons before they entired the maze.  It wasn’t going for Harry’s neck, just his face, hands and feet, and it had broad blades.    
  
Harry stared at him in terror.   Not knowing what else to use, since his hands were utterly useless against the grass, Tom bit the leaf away from Harry’s mouth and spit it out.  
  
Their lips brushed against each other gently.  
  
Time froze.  
  
It was a very, very long minute.  
  
“Do that again.”   Harry whispered..  
  
Tom grinned wildly and kissed him again, better this time, wrapping his hand around the back of Harry’s head and into his hair.  
  
The grass fell away from Harry’s wrists and ankles.  
  
The wall fell away from behind him.    
  
Tom fell on top of Harry.    
  
They kept kissing regardless.  
  
“Congratulations!”   The trade minister says.  “We knew you would solve the maze.”  
  
They are treated to a lovely harvest banquet and elected ‘Harvest-Bringers’, and when Captain Janeway asks how their away mission went, Harry says it’s a very long story.    
  
Tom, being senior officer, has to write that report.   Janeway thinks it’s _hysterical._  


	3. Chapter 3

The fifth first kiss had to do with Jefferies tubes.   Mostly how much Tom hated Jefferies tubes.  
  
They were assigned to work in Jefferies tube 14-B one morning.   Tom began by trying to just hand Harry the tools from outside.  
  
“Will you just bring the toolbox in here?”  
  
“Oh, all right.”   Tom brought the tools inside.   “Can I go now?”  
  
“No!   You’re supposed to be helping me with this.”  
  
Tom just sat there with his knees against his chest and his arms around his knees, eyes shut.  
  
“Pass me that hyperspanner?”  
  
Nothing.  
  
“Tom?   You okay?”  
  
Still nothing.  
  
Harry gently brushed his friend’s shoulder.   Tom’s shoulder felt like deuterium.   “Are you all right?”  
  
“I’m fine.”  But he did not actually sound fine.    And he sure as hell didn’t look fine.  
  
“Look, Tom.”   Harry says.   “I know you’re claustrophobic -“  
  
“I am not claustrophobic.  I just don’t like small spaces.”  
  
“That’s the definition of being claustrophobic.   Why are you claustrophbic?”  
  
Silence fell for about a minute.   Then Tom started talking.  
  
“The regular cells - the ones in the penal colony - were six feet by nine.   Bed at one end, bathroom at the other, that was basically it.    I know how big they were because I have a two-foot stride and I measured them.    You do a lot of pacing.  Not much else to do.   But if you have a smart mouth - you may have noticed I have a smart mouth - you get sent to the isolation unit.   And those cells were about three feet by two.   You could sit upright in them.   Kind of.   And they were always dark, there were no windows - I think iso was below ground, actually - so you had to spend days in the dark with nothing but the sound of the plumbing for company and your own sharpening madness.”  
  
Harry felt a wave of sympathy for his friend.  He dropped the hyperspanner he was working with and tackled him backwards into an enormous hug.  
  
Then he looked down into Tom’s eyes.  
  
They looked up at him - so blue, so challenging.  
  
Harry kissed him, first gently, and then less gently.   Then he showed Tom that it was possible to have some fun in small spaces with the right person.  
  
  
The sixth first kiss was because of Naomi Wildman.   Mostly.  
  
Harry had been drafted to babysit Naomi and Tom came along because he was bored, he said.  Harry thought he secretly liked Naomi - he wasn’t much on baby _maintenance,_ but there was never anyone better for baby _encouragement._    He was always there whenever she was learning something with praise and smiles.  
  
“You’re good with kids.”   Harry said.   “You have cousins?   Nieces?   Nephews?”  
  
“Two older sisters. They might have kids by now.  But I’m the baby.”  Tom shrugged.   “All I have to do is think about how I was raised, and then do the exact opposite thing.   Easy.”  
  
Harry sighs.   “That’s depressing.”  
  
“That’s life, Harry.  Like it or lump it.”   He picked up Naomi.   “And kidlet, you smell _really_ bad.   Here, Harry, change her.”  
  
“Oh no.   You’re going to learn something today.”   And he marches Tom and the baby into Naomi’s room, where the changing table is, and puts her on it.     
  
Tom looked at the baby like he was about to dissect her.  Naomi spat at him cheerfully.  
  
“Just undo her sleeper, like this,”  Harry said with a sigh, “and then take off her diaper.”  
  
“Don’t you need gloves for this?”  
  
“Are you allergic to water?   I mean, I know you were just before you turned into a lizard, but are you _still_ allergic to water?”  
  
Tom sighed deeply and unfastened the diaper.  “Eeeugh.”  
  
Harry handed him a large handful of wipes.  “Now clean her off with these.”  
  
“Yeah.”   Tom did so.   Harry folded everything up in the diaper and provided a new one.     
  
“There you go.”   Tom did up the sides and snapped up her sleeper again.  “All clean.  Better?”  
  
Naomi blew a spit bubble in his face and grabbed onto his hair.     
  
“Ow, ow.   That hurts.”  
  
Harry came back in and shoved Tom into a chair.   “Here, feed her her bottle.”  
  
“What happens after I do that?”  
  
“We’ll see.”   A ghost of a smile was playing around Harry’s lips, and Tom decided to just let it play there.     
  
She fell asleep when she was finished her bottle, and Harry put her in her crib.   Tom turned down the lights and then they went out into the main room.  
  
“Now what?”   Tom said.  
  
“I always went along when my girlfriends or boyfriends went babysitting in high school.”   Harry said.    
  
“For the experience?”     
  
“Yes, but not the kind you think.”   Harry smiled at him and kissed him soundly on the lips.    Harry smelled like baby powder and tasted like fruit juice and kissed like a demon let loose.   He bit Tom’s lower lip and then soothed it with his tongue and Tom thought he was dreaming.   He kept pinching himself, but he wasn’t dreaming.     
  
When Sam got back from the holodeck, she found her two babysitters with their clothes half off, but she just laughed and told them to take it someplace else. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading :)


End file.
